-by NoahSometimes satirists have a very hard time satirizing Congress. Case in point: the current Congressional hearings about glitches in the allegedly satanic, marxist, communist, Muslim jihad-influenced Affordable Care Act; aka, dare we say it out loud, Obamacare.How does one satirize a bunch of morons in suits who have but one discernable talent-- satirizing themselves, whether intentionally or not, better than anyone else could ever hope to? Satirist Andy Borowitz makes a valiant effort below.
In an impressive white-knuckle performance on live television today, members of Congress spent several hours in a hearing room pretending to understand the Internet.Beginning this morning, members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee devoted four hours to grilling Web-site contractors about site architecture, Web traffic, software, and other I.T. concepts about which their ignorance is nearly complete.“As members of this committee, we are supposed to have a deep understanding of the technology involved in the health-care Web site,” said Chairman Fred Upton (R-Michigan). “So it was absolutely imperative for us to fake that we do.”For the duration of the hearings, the Web contractors offered detailed testimony about “end-to-end testing,” “enterprise identity management,” and other technical concepts to a group of elected officials who can barely use e-mail.“I would say that, to a man, we did not understand ninety-nine per cent of that computer nonsense they were going on about,” Chairman Upton said. “To me it was a whole lot of blahbitty-blahbitty-blah. I hope it wasn’t too obvious.”Rep. Upton said that “looking serious and nodding our heads a lot” contributed to the illusion that committee members had even scant comprehension of what was being discussed.“At the end of the day, a lot of it came down to not asking the questions you really wanted to ask,” he said. “Like, ‘What exactly is a Web site?'"
Thursday’s hearing was a fine example of how politics more often than not, attracts the dumbest among us. It was chaired, as Borowitz says, by the infamous Fred Upton, Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.Upton, the representative from Michigan’s 6th District is best known for his endless hearings and non-stop wailings/lamentations about President Obama forcing us all to use those money saving, end of civilization-causing, more energy efficient curly-cue light bulbs instead of the more traditional values incandescent light bulbs; never mind that pushing them darn newfangled light bulbs was one of George Dubya Bush’s ideas, put forward in his Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, an act that, get this, Upton co-sponsored in the House! Does this man hate himself? Is he a schizo?To be fair, and I’m always fair, no less a luminary than Glenn Beck has called Upton a socialist for supporting the bill (before he stuck his finger in the teabag wind and turned against it), thus indirectly explaining how he got to Washington. It takes a district of morons to send a moron to Washington to represent their desires to go back to caveman times.By Republican logic, if President Obama pushed for the old incandescent light bulbs, Upton and his brainless ilk would be demanding we light our homes only with kerosene lamps. Hey, that would make Upton’s big oil benefactors damn happy, wouldn’t it?While it’s true that the website rollout has problems (It seems to work fine in my state, New York), personally, I’m struck by the irony that a bunch of clowns, who want to do away with Obamacare, are all up in arms about people not being able to participate in it; more of that Washington genius thing, I guess.A thought: Is the nonsense over the ACA website glitches really just a measure of how spoiled and instant gratification oriented our society has become? What kind of people complain about the slowness of something that is still faster than sending away for a form, filling it out and sending it back via snailmail, especially with today’s Post Office, which Washington has done its best to bankrupt and ruin ?Obviously, the Republicans, who walk among us almost passing for normal people, see the website glitches as a golden opportunity to end something they voted over 40 times to defund, before they shut down the government over it, without giving up their own “government healthcare”, of course.New Jersey’s Democratic representative, Frank Pallone, adds a rare few moments of lucidity in the House cesspool. He does it with nice NJ style, too.The shut down cost us taxpayers $24 billion in GDP. That’s a nice little wad of cash that is not in each of our pockets now, thank you so much, you a-holes. So, how do the bright lights of the Republican Party proceed?Answer: We are seeing it right now. They are now uselessly, nihilistically, destructively and pointlessly spending millions more in our taxpayer dollars on hearings which will go on and on for days. Then, there will be more hearings; months of them, one after another, just like their non-stop, seemingly uncountable and desperate Benghazi hearings. How would a sane world treat these people? Satire is nowhere near enough.
